The present invention is related to a toothpick. The toothpick prevents the gums from being damaged when food leftovers stuck between teeth are removed when using the toothpick. The toothpick is easy to carry and can be used repeatedly.
A conventional toothpick (not shown) consists of a cylindrical grasping portion and an interteeth inserting portion one or both ends of which are slant-angled and sharp-pointed. When removing food leftover between teeth using the conventional toothpick, the interteeth inserting portion is forcibly inserted between two teeth. Because of to the thickness of the toothpick the teeth's surrounding tissues are damaged and the spaces between teeth are widened. Repeated use of the conventional toothpick which causes the spaces between teeth to become larger will eventually increase the amount of food remaining between the teeth. Furthermore, due to the pointed end of the toothpick, the gums may be hurt if the pointed end is pushed into the gums causing their inflammation or odontological disease. An additional drawback of the conventional toothpick is that most of the toothpicks are mixed with food garbage after usage so that the food garbage is difficult to reuse as animal feed. For this reason, the food garbage is useless and will have a great influence on environmental pollution.
The amount of toothpicks used reaches thousands of ton for every year nationwide. Partly, toothpicks are imported from overseas. For the raw material of the toothpicks, tens of thousands of trees older than 10 years are required, thereby giving bad effect on earth warming prevention.
Accordingly, to solve the problems as above, Korean Laid-open Utility Model No. 88-21409 entitled "Interteeth Cleaner" discloses a device comprising a grip made of deformable elastic material and a central shaft with a tri-directional brush formed on one side of the grip. However, a process for making the brush onto the central shaft is difficult to perform, resulting in a higher production cost. Even in use, the space between teeth is not easily inserted by the brush formed on the central shaft, making it inconvenient. Further, the once-used interteeth cleaner does not easily remove the leftover stuck between teeth. Thus, this cannot be reused for sanitary reasons.